


Weep, You Skies

by valderys



Category: The Silver Metal Lover - Tanith Lee
Genre: Arrogance, Character Study, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/F, F/M, Ghosts, Vanity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-16
Updated: 2015-12-16
Packaged: 2018-05-07 02:02:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5439350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valderys/pseuds/valderys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My name is Egyptia and no-one understands me.  I dream of death, you see, all the time.  The screams of a million lost souls filling up my nights.  My name is Egyptia and this is my story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Weep, You Skies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [idleflower](https://archiveofourown.org/users/idleflower/gifts).



> I was so happy to get this assignment, I love this story and have done for many years. I was particularly pleased to get matched on this fandom as we know Tanith Lee sadly passed away earlier this year and I felt that by writing this, I was honouring her. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to do that.

No-one understands me.

That's a central fact of my existence.

Actually, I don't think anyone even tries to understand me. Although I find that I am not as upset at this fact as others might be - it is the tragedy of my life and I am used to it. In fact, if things were different then I would not be the person I am now - and then the world would have lost something important. 

After all, my genius might never have been discovered.

***

My name is Egyptia. My mother's name is not important, although I know it's how Jane started her magnum opus. But tempting though it is to emulate her, in the end, I think, I am all that matters. I remember when I was young, quite young, no more than thirteen I think, I fell in love with Davideed. Now this wasn't the first time I fell in love, of course not, I was _thirteen_ , for heaven's sake - but it was the first time that it felt real. That it felt it could be possible, that it could swallow me up in the full physical reality of love. Davideed is like that, you see, so down to earth, so impossibly, hugely _there_ at all times. I felt he could anchor me, that he could hold me in his arms and nothing would ever threaten me again.

Davideed smells like spices, as he never eats anything that hasn't had at least a modicum of cumin or coriander, garam masala or ginger. I fancied he would taste of spices too, which my naive thirteen year old self was looking forward to. And Davideed didn't disappoint, he spent time with me, as patient as you pleased. And I kissed his lush, spicy mouth and I thought love was everything. I really thought it would help.

***

I dream of death, you see. I dream of it all the time. My own death, of course, falling into the water, my flesh rotting and leaving bones like alabaster. My hair tumbling down like leaves in autumn. Twining with water weed and feeding mermaid's purses. But I dream of other people's deaths too. The Asteroid killed so many, hundreds of millions of them - how could their deaths not affect the psychic shell of the world, how could their screams as they died, an unprecedented number of people all dying at once, not have had effect on those who came after?

I think I can hear them, you see. I don't tell people that. I do talk about death and the Asteroid, and that I think I'm dying - all the time. I know I do. I can't help it. I have to let it out somehow. But I don't mention I can hear them, like a huge scream that never ends. It makes me want to lose myself in things. In talking, always talking, but never listening. In pleasure, eating and eating, beautiful sugary flowers, opalescent jellied fruits and melting ices. In drinking smoky wines, tart cordials, and spirits so delicate they boil away like smoke in my glass. But it's never enough, you see.

***

It didn't work out with Davideed. You could tell that, couldn't you? I couldn't. Not at that age. But I was young. Not like now, I am nineteen now, nineteen going on two hundred. I feel aged and useless, but also young and vital - as though I could spill my blood and feed the world.

But Davideed. He is down to earth. As lumpen and solid as a concrete block. As inexorable as the Asteroid. But I was wrong - love isn't enough, it is never enough, not when you carry the weight of a dying world on your shoulders, in your heart and head. And not when Davideed is a boy, as solid and lumpen as clay. How could I expect him to understand? He anchored me, it's true, but I needed more than that. I need more than that.

He studies silt now, did you know that? How terribly, awfully appropriate.

***

I was fifteen, I think, when I fell in love with Clovis. Which was stupid of me but also deliberately part of the point. I knew he was M-B, of course, Mirror-Biased, reflecting his own gender in his sexual desires and needs, Clovis had known, oh, forever, I should think. And therefore, all of Clovis's friends also knew he was M-B, his child psychologist knew he was M-B, his parents, relatives and the poor subsistence worker who collects the trash knew he was M-B. It's not as though Clovis is particularly subtle. Or particularly kind.

Except he is. Sometimes, when it suits him.

He was kind while I was in love with him. He can't put up with his own lovers for more than a few days, but he put up with me being in love with him for months. It was flattering to his ego, I know, and Clovis does like that. And it's not like I tried to touch him - that would have been anathema, but I knew my limits. I adorned myself and perfumed myself and painted each individual toenail in a pastoral scene to match his current decor, and then I lounged around decoratively, whilst loving him. He liked that, I think. He has always been appreciative of beauty in all its forms. Distant worship, like that of a supplicant to her god, was a pleasing thing to Clovis in many ways.

And I found it distracting, being some kind of vestal mired in a shrine, where the vicissitudes of the world, and the screams I could hear in my head were subdued by the marble walls. At least, I thought they were, I could fool myself they were - like a nun hiding ignorant from the battles that would ravish her in the end.

It didn't last. Nothing ever does. We ended up screaming bloody murder at each other, as the dreams began to overwhelm me. As the colours of the soil as they were torn up and the bones of the earth as they were rearranged, swamped my senses. 

I said it was stupid of me, but not for the reasons people think.

***

The problem with dreaming about death, all the time, is that it never actually ends, even though you think it will and at any minute. You don't actually die, so you carry on dreaming, and anticipating it, and so on, forever. It's like living on a knife edge permanently. It's lucky I've never succumbed to drug taking, apart from socially acceptable party drugs, of course, like we all do. Well, apart from Jane. I don't suppose she's ever taken anything stronger than coffipop or wine cooler. I wonder what it's like being Jane? Not constantly thinking about the end of the world. Being so innocent?

But then - we all know how Jane feels. Ever since she put out her book. And I suppose we all see what she thinks of us in turn. Oh, of course, names have been changed to protect the guilty blah blah. But us? Our friends? They all know. I suppose I should be hurt at the descriptions of me, I know Jason and Medea have been poisonous about theirs - but that hardly changes their essential nature, I suppose, so perhaps it doesn't count. And that's the strange thing, that I'm not. Upset, that is. Jane doesn't understand the whole of me, no-one does, but she does get parts of it. Even some of the less than nice parts. She understood about my genius, for example. And how important it is.

I'm quite fond of Jane.

***

When I was sixteen, I fell in love with Jane. There's a pattern here, I can feel you thinking it. Well, you're not wrong, it's not my fault that I didn't understand. That I didn't know it wouldn't be enough. I was still young. Of course, falling in love with Jane was possibly even more pointless than falling in love with Clovis. At least Clovis noticed, which is more than Jane ever did. That was when I started taking Jane on shopping trips and buying her things on my card, as hers had such a silly little limit. That was when I tried to get her to do her hair in different ways, to try on different colours, to wear something, anything, that her mother, Demeter, hadn't picked out for her first. I only had limited success. She was such a timid little thing then, and she cried a lot - that's when I first started investing in waterproof makeup, through sheer necessity. Being Jane's friend, being in love with Jane, involves a certain amount of sogginess, that I thought was a small price to pay.

Because when Jane wept, I could weep with her, and the catharsis in that was an enormous relief. I could weep for all the poor dead people inhabiting my head, and that made them easier to bear, for a while. And when Jane wept, I could console her, I could throw my arms around her comfortable, round body and hug her, I could stroke her beautiful bronze hair, and it was so much better than any kind of pet, better than actually having a lover proper, because it lasted, and because she was my friend.

Well, I thought it would last. I thought she was my friend.

No, that's not fair. She was. She is. Sort of.

***

Of course, Jane's a little broken. I think perhaps we all are - poor little rich kids, with too much money and time on our hands and not enough attention. Boo hoo. Let's all get weepy, like Jane. But really, well, I mean to say, I think Jane had the worst of it. I mean, have you met Demeter? Have you talked to her? Oh, even thinking about it makes me shudder. She scares me, and there are very few things in life that scare me, after the Asteroid, not truly scare me - there's a difference in being deliciously terrified, as I hope you know. But Demeter... Jane is lucky to come out of there with only an addiction to tears, I think.

Demeter interviewed me after Jane vanished. After she sold the entire contents of her suite and vanished into the slums with Silver. Demeter was frantic. Of course, frantic in Demeter means a slight tightening around the eyes and a certain shortness of temper, but I could still tell. I was scared, remember, so tiny details magnified themselves in my mind. I sat there on the other end of the phone, visual on, and quailed before that visage like a mouse beneath a stooping hawk. I was just lucky that I didn't know anything, or I might have babbled all about it. And I'd entirely forgotten about Silver or I'd have betrayed him a lot earlier. Isn't that fortunate? You see, I was rehearsing with the Theatre Concordacis by then. I was consumed with this new art, this potential fulfilment of my genius, I was empowered by my character, Antektra. Well, it's luck of a kind anyway.

***

When I was eighteen, I fell in love with Silver. That stands for Silver Ionized Locomotive Verisimulated Electronic Robot. But you know all about that, don't you? If you've read Jane's book? And if you haven't read Jane's book, what are you doing reading this? Oh, unless it's because of my fame - I should have thought of that. Of course future generations will want to read my memoirs, perhaps I should have explained the details more fully? Oh heavens, that's for the forward, or the footnotes, or for some poor scholar who worships me from afar, to sort out, I'm not interested in those kinds of details.

So about Silver - I fell in love with him in one strange, wonderful, ridiculous night. And then I forgot about him. It was such a formative experience, a perfect night of passion, filled with such inhuman tenderness, that it could have spoiled me for a real man's love, if I had let it, and so I believe it was self-protection that meant I forgot about Silver. And the fact that I later left him with the house robots in a cupboard.

That sounds harsh, now I say that aloud. Oh dear. Particularly now we know he wasn't just a robot. I have to say that I wish I could have tested that part through the lens of my genius more fully, I wish I could have had a night with the Copper range and with Golder in turn. Just to compare. I'm sure it would have been obvious that Silver was unique, and then I could have explained to everyone the difference between a transcendent spiritual experience and the mere physical pleasure brought about by plastic, metal and wires. That might have saved Jane from tragedy, later. Or maybe not. Maybe I'm fooling myself and I would have become the betraying principle anyway. I suppose we'll never know.

***

Which brings me to Antektra - the fulfilment of my genius and the start of everything else. I look back on the crucible of Ask the Peacock For My My Brother's Dust as though in some kind of dream. It felt important, you see? It felt like the end of all things and the beginning too. It felt like death - I really thought I would fall down dead after the first performance, my heart just exploded in my chest. But then, I knew that I couldn't do that - the dead people in my head wouldn't let me. I had to channel them, I had to let them have a voice through me. And that was the most cathartic thing of all. I felt hollowed out afterwards, as though I was some empty vessel that had poured my libation all away, never thinking about tomorrow or the day after. It was peaceful.

It was such a strange night. Jane was there and I thought she was there for me, after having vanished for all those weeks. I thought she cared... And then EM rang asking about their robot and - well, you know what I did. It was easy. It shouldn't have been, but it was. It slipped out as easily as breathing, which I was still doing. I hadn't died, like I thought I would.

And that was when the roof fell in.

***

I am nineteen now and I am in love. I am in love with all the world, and the world loves me back, and in doing so I am completed at last. I have contracts with companies now, with companies that make visuals, they wish to fly me around the world and let me spill my genius on the thirsty ground of their greed. And that's the beauty of it - these voices that I thought were so overwhelming, that filled me so entirely, that made me quake in my bed every night, that make me dream of death... These shades have an outlet now. For all I talked of becoming an empty vessel after a performance, which I still find to be the case, and the quietude is still wonderful, yet there is another key component - that I won't stay empty long. There were thousands upon thousands who died due to the Asteroid and I can't give voice to them all in an instant, it's a process. It will take time. But I can hope that eventually I may be emptied completely, and that they may all be satisfied. It's my dream, if you will. That I can become ordinary one day, ordinary and at peace.

And in the meantime there is my Art. My genius. Thank goodness I found it.

***

There's just one more thing.

While I was in Egypt recently (how appropriate, how inevitable for a woman called Egyptia), filming for another visual, another historical tragedy (goodness, typecast already, at such a young age), I was taken out for a moonlit stroll around the pyramids by one of my co-stars. He was an insipid thing, but my character had to find him magnetic, had to be willing to die for him - so I made the effort. I let him romance me, and talk sweet nothings and compare me to a princess out of antiquity, or whatever nonsense he decided would be best to get me into his bed. I would have let him - it would have added to verisimilitude of the role if I slept with him - except that I'm afraid I became distracted. Who wouldn't be?

Of course, I believe in ghosts. Have you not been reading this memoir? Of course, I believe in life after death, so I don't know why I was so very flustered. I had hysterics, I admit it, and my co-star was frightened and left me alone while he ran to get help, the coward. But it didn't move _him_. My apparition. Not one iota. Silver was a slim shadow casually leaning on a tomb and he'd never looked more solemn. I'm not sure my co-star could see him, but I could, of course I could.

I suppose I deserved it. I hadn't meant to, but I'd killed him. So I deserved the fright. I suppose I had even meant it, really, if I have to be honest. I hate being _actually honest_ , I prefer to be spiritually honest, which is more delicate and much less messy. The shadow of the sphinx fell on both of us but Silver didn't vanish in the slumberous twilight, as I rather hoped he would. I found that poetic, the sphinx's shadow, I mean. The sphinx is famous for riddles and what greater riddle is there but what lies in that Undiscovered Country from whose bourn no traveller returns? Perhaps Silver could tell us? I nearly asked him.

But it turned out that wasn't what he was there for. I thought it might have been to haunt me but I don't think one little visitation counts as a proper haunting and I've not seen him since. I tried to tell him this, as I stammered something about the voices of the dead and the importance of my genius and that was why I did what I did. How the whole world loved me now, and all about the libations, and how that made everything alright.

Silver heard me out, at least, but I don't think he really listened because then he said, "I forgive you". Like some cheap soap star, so banal. It took me aback, I can tell you. Was that why he was there? Did I need his forgiveness? I wasn't sure I did.

He smiled then, a little sadly, and added, "But I don't think you know anything about love." And then he vanished.

Which just goes to show you that no-one really understands me, or my genius, as I said at the beginning. Not even a ghost. And why I had to write this memoir of my own. Because, really? I wasn't going to let that stand. How dare he? Even if he is dead. Because you've read my story now in all its details, the swooping lows, the glorious highs - and who else knows more of love than I?


End file.
